Giving Voice to Good Teachers

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Let’s Hear it for the Heroines

The past week has been an education in the civil rights movement for me.

As I was researching my post on teacher/activist Septima Clark, I began reading about the March on Washington, too. For all of her work towards equality and jobs for African Americans; for all of the inspiration she offered speakers at the March like John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought: Surely Septima must have been invited to speak, too!

But I couldn’t find any record of that happening, and discovered that women’s voices were not well represented at the March overall. Here’s what I learned from The Root , Teaching Tolerance, and Democracy Now:

– There was a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom,” but Septima Clark was not among those honored.

– Medgar Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers, was scheduled as the speaker for the tribute to women, but got stuck in traffic and didn’t get to speak at all had a prior speaking engagement in Boston.

– Daisy Bates was tapped to speak in Evers’s place . Her remarks were about a minute long, and she was the only woman to address the crowd during the official program.

– There were two separate marches: the men walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the women — including Daisy Bates and Rosa Parks — walked down Independence Avenue.